We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.